Tuesday, August 24, 2010

After a brief summer break for August, the Carnival of Natural Parenting is back. We hope you'll join us for the next carnival in September! (Check out January, February, March, April, and May, June, and July if you missed them.)

Theme: We're all home schoolers: Children, of whatever age, are learning all the time. Describe some of the ways your children learn at home as a natural part of their day. No matter if your children attend (or plan to attend) traditional schools or not, please talk to us about how you incorporate home-schooling or unschooling ideals and practices into your children's education.

Deadline: Tuesday, September 7. Fill out the webform (at the link or at the bottom) and email your submission to us by 11:59 p.m. Pacific time: mail {at} HoboMama.com and CodeNameMama {at} gmail.com

Carnival date: Tuesday, September 14. Before you post, we will send you an email with a little blurb in html to paste into your submission that will introduce the carnival. You will publish your post on September 14 and email us the link if you haven't done so already. Once everyone's posts are published on September 14 by noon Eastern time, we will send out a finalized list of all the participants' links, to generate lots of link love for your site! We'll include full instructions in the email we send before the posting date.

Please do: Write well. Write on topic. Write a brand new post for the carnival. As always, our carnival themes aren't meant to be exclusionary. If your experience doesn't perfectly mesh with the carnival theme, please lend your own perspective. Please also feel free to be creative within the gentle confines of the carnival structure. If you're feeling so inspired, you could write a poem, a photo essay, a scholarly article, or a book review instead of a regular blog post (though those are welcomed, too!), as long as what you write is respectful of the carnival's intent. If you want help determining that ahead of time, please talk with us.

Please don't: Please don't use profanity of the sort that might be offensive to more sensitive readers or their children. Please don't submit irrelevant or argumentative pieces contrary to the principles of natural parenting. You don't have to agree with all our ideals — and certainly you don't have to live up to them all perfectly! — but your submission does have to fit the theme and values of the carnival.

Editors' rights: We reserve the right to edit your piece or suggest edits to you. We reserve the right to courteously reject any submissions that are inappropriate for the carnival. Please also note that since there are two co-hosts on different schedules and conferring over email, our personal response to your submission might seem delayed. Don't be alarmed. We also reserve the right to impose consequences if the responsibilities of the carnival are not fulfilled by the participants.

If you don't have a blog: Contact us (mail {at} HoboMama.com and CodeNameMama {at} gmail.com) about potentially finding you a host blog to guest post. Please write your piece well in advance of the deadline in that case, so we can match you up with someone suitable. But if you really have something amazing to write — why not start your own blog? If you want advice, we find Scribbit's free Blogging in Pink ebook to be a very helpful and down-to-earth guide, for beginners on up.

If you have questions: Please leave a comment or contact us: mail {at} HoboMama.com and CodeNameMama {at} gmail.com

Links to tutorials: Lauren and Dionna have written several tutorials for our participants about how to schedule posts in advance, how to determine post URLs in advance, how to edit HTML — all for both Wordpress and Blogger users. For these tutorials and more, please see this handy summary post at LaurenWayne.com.

Good question, Marita! In general, we let participants post after midnight in their own time zone, so our non-US/Canada bloggers are usually ahead of those of us here in the Western Hemisphere. However, most of the links in the link list won't be live until the majority of the participants post, so if you think that will confuse your readers, you're welcome to delay posting till later in your day when more of the others have posted. Does that help?

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Riding the rails with my husband, Crackerdog Sam, and our hobo kids, Mikko Lint Picker (born June 2007), Alrik Irontrousers (born May 2011), and one on the way (coming October 2014). Trying every day to parent intentionally and with grace.